If you’re an ME, you are going to hope that the CE you’ve just assigned a project will be extremely good at his job and do a near-perfect one. Some of them actually come quite close – it’s a perfectionist’s craft, and CEs do want to catch everything. The truth is they never do. The question is how to deal with those occasions when you’re disappointed, because you would love to find the perfect copyeditor, and if you think you’ve found one, you will be that. So, review the work he’s done, and not just the first time you try him. If a CE is any good, or very good, or extremely good at the job, tell him what he missed, because he will have missed something and will want to know. Did he break house style anywhere? Is there a word he will be embarrassed to know he’s misused? Tell him, and then send him another project, and then tell him again. Every copyeditor wants to develop a stable of steady clients, the same way that every ME wants a stable of reliable copyeditors. So keep the feedback going and develop a respectful relationship.
If you’re an author, you are very likely to be nervous about the copyeditor. You have good right to be. Some are more skilled than others, or more experienced, and some will have more of an affinity for the kind of book you’ve written. But you can expect all of them to want to do the best job they can. As a basic principle, almost everything they do is advice, and they’ll tell you that. There will be a house style the CE is expected to apply to your book (punctuation, spelling, treatment of numbers, other minor style points), but in terms of changing your words and sentences, everything you will see they have done is advice. The house that assigned it will say the same thing – a copyedit is always advice. They don’t add, “and you would be a fool not to take almost all of it,” but that is also true.
You almost certainly won’t have any contact with the CE until his work on the mscript is completed. The house will probably have informed you at some point, “We have assigned your book to [name] for copyediting …” Except for that, your first contact with him will be through a cover letter attached to a copyedited manuscript. At some houses, the letter will arrive directly from the CE, with the mscript. At other houses, it will be channelled through the ME. In the cover letter, the CE will introduce himself, tell you what he did to the mscript, and tell you what to do next. He will be polite and respectful and will tell you that he enjoyed the assignment (whether he did or not). If he has any experience at all, he will tell you what it is. If he has a website, he will provide the address. (I do have a website, which lists the 600 or so academic mscripts I have worked on. It tends to reassure most authors and intimidate the rest.)
Copyeditors get nervous too, mainly about whether the author is going to turn out to be, how to put it, a toxic wackjob. It’s like being hit by a tornado in a dark when a CE encounters one of those, though I would add that there are surprisingly few of them – perhaps 10 out of 600 I’ve encountered could be described that way. Still, you always wonder. Here are some warning signs that you may be in for one:
• They’ve written an English literature mscript. (I’ve stopped accepting those projects – the odds are too high).
• They’ve written a social work or pedagogy mscript. The boredom can be crippling, and it’s impossible to convince them how boring.
• They’ve published before, which can at times mean they think they’ve earned the right to be left alone. Actually, it is the most experienced authors who most appreciate a good CE, because they know what one looks like. But there is a small subset of authors who have published prolifically without ever having been belled by a CE, and they can make a CE’s life hell.
• They’ve never published before. Many authors simply don’t understand how badly they write, and you’re about to be the first to tell them. Most first-timers take a CE well, because they’re anxious enough about their first book to take any advice they can get, but again, there’s always a subset that goes very much the other way.
A copyedit should sting a little. The author should be at least somewhat abashed by what you’ve caught. And conversely, the author’s review should embarrass the CE at least a little. Remember that writing is largely about bringing together the content, while the copyediting is a process. The author has decided what he wants to say, and the CE stays out of that. The CE recommends how the author should say it, and the author would be well-advised to listen.
If you’re a CE, you want some pushback from the author, if only as assurance that the author looked close at what you did. You’ll have made some errors, you always do, however hard you try to avoid them, and you want the author to catch them. The most fraught reviews are where the author sends a mscript back to you without changes. Dread those. If the author makes changes, you can always override them during the review of his review, and believe it, he won’t notice that you did.
I wish I hadn’t read The Secret Agent
Too much copyediting – that is, too many years or decades of it – can ruin some authors for you. I truly wish I hadn’t read Conrad’s The Secret Agent this autumn, or for that matter his Heart of Darkness. He was (famously) ESL Polish, and for all his reputation as a brilliant stylist … well no, he wasn’t. His style amounts to a tormented exercise in searching for the right word, and he misses as often as he hits it. I have found I can’t read him without tweaking his vocabulary and muttering sentence recasts under my breath as I go.
He should have stuck to Polish (or French – apparently his French was better than his English) and found a good translator. I’m a big fan of translators. The best ones tend to write better (which here means more clearly) than most authors. I’d much rather read Balzac, Zola, or Hugo than Dickens, Thackeray, or Fielding. The people who translate the first three are almost certain to be better writers or their own account.